Yeah imagine a poor person stuck in a negative relationship for financial reasons watching that scene. Of course the film makers stopped listening and started laughing at "imagine a poor person"

get really weird with their position in society where they earn more than most but are also a marginalized group with no real representation. Like, it drives them fucking crazy or something.

IMO it's a function of "who would want to immigrate here in the first place"

My dad is a supreme cuck who literally worships Trump and hand-to-mouth believes everything on fox news
My mom on the other hand, has uttered some of the based-est things I've ever heard offline. On migrants illegally entering Europe: "good, they deserve it, and more"

US only allows perfect workers to immigrate here. And the most efficient worker is one that ignores social issues, and doesn't think too hard about anything outside of their work. Since the workers are almost all going to be men, it would follow that the men of these families would be more "cucked" or "reactionary" than the women. That's how I rationalize my family at least. Luckily, half my genes come from my mom, and women being SAHM tradwifes came with a happenstance advantage in this case

But really there are tons of spiritual sellouts in every race, the most sane one is probably Black people in my experience but they exist even there too. Latinos can be just as bad as Asians, with people desperate to be "castizo" or whatever.

the Asian kids in AP talking about how they thought Mexicans/blacks/all the minorities usually not stereotyped as “smart” are dumb and smell bad

Was slightly guilty of this in HS, except for the "smell bad" part (that's just weird)

Part of the reason I got radicalized was because I grew up as an upper bougie kid with a superiority complex, except Indian. When this superiority complex clashed with the mayo mainstream, I changed my worldview

Our school was 30% Asian/Indian, 80% Asian in the AP classes, so it was almost inevitable that some kind of superiority complex would develop.
It was particularly so when looking at the East Asian kids. I'm talking 6'3" Korean guys with soap opera looks, getting straight A+s while ALSO being captain of the tennis/volleyball team AND making finalist for the state level music competition and a million other things on top of that. Meanwhile, your Italian friends in the "regular" track would be struggling to pass the class that you aced two years ago. If you went back to the late 2000s and told young-me about "white supremacy" I would literally not even understand what you were talking about--the thought literally never occurred to me.

One of the things that woke me up, and this happened while I was still in HS, was affirmative action--or more accurately an encounter with how whites perceived affirmative action.
For background, pretty much everyone knew that there was a penalty for being Asian, and that the "bonus points" hierarchy went something like Native American > Black > Hispanic > White > Asian.

Once at lunchtime, while talking about college, one of the white kids chimed in and said something to me like "well it won't matter if your grades aren't perfect, you'll still get a boost from being a minority"
To which I, and all the Asian and Indian kids sitting at the table, viscerally and immediately said "No, wtf are you even talking about?" It was literally like saying that 1 + 1 = fish.

That was basically my first experience with the "white world", by which I mean a very inertial, persistent, factually dubious, and foreign narrative which is followed by most white people in the country. Also for the record, I later came to realize that there were valid reasons for things like affirmative action (still not for whites relative to Asians though) and that it in fact didn't go anywhere near far enough

...but at what cost? :duck-dance:

being racistly abused have you tried having insane amounts of wealth. It says something when your movie has a worst take on class and race than Scarface

first film

:horror:

There are worse fates for models on singaporean epstein's container ship...

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never saw the movie, but I assume it's a way to have pretend-racial-pride even when the capitalist machinations which do so hurt more Asians at the expense of helping your rich banker self (and a bunch of white bankers), which makes it anti-Asian when all is weighed out.

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So... here's the thing about CRA- the guy that wrote it only lived in Singapore till he was like 12 or something before his rich family moved to the States. That said, he wrote what he knew, which was about the kind of strange pathologies only the super-rich acquire, and along with that the culture shock of being an immigrant and the struggles on squaring that identity with your original identity back home (altho, obviously this plays less of a role in the book as Joel points out, since the book is more obviously centered around a class based Cinderella story).

What that means is that the picture he paints of Singapore is really really skewed- for one, it's 30 years out of date, and (as every Singaporean will tell you) Singapore is a lot more diverse than as portrayed in the film. In his defense, he only claims to be writing about the tiny slice of the population in the title (effectively, the 1%) and he does have some kinda/sorta interesting things to say about racism in the follow-up books with some of the secondary characters, but that's obviously not in the movie.

What the movie is, is a Liberal Immigrant Chinese power-fantasy- of a mythical homeland where Asians aren't the ones oppressed or subject to white power structures, but where they are the ones with all the power. It's a movie about being able to live in two worlds- of being able to inhabit a Western Liberal immigrant identity as a component of global capital, and of being able to use the supposed "superior" qualities of progressive liberalism to seamlessly leverage and transition back into a place of true belonging, to return to the homeland as a beacon of modernity against stodgy Conservatism (as embodied by Michelle Yeoh's character, who really deserved better).

There was nothing more infuriating than reading the discourse after the movie came out, where a lot of Asian diaspora who were celebrating the film for it's all Asian cast as a landmark cultural moment (and rightly so, I think, even tho such things do ring hollow under neo-liberalism) hijacked leftist terminology to defend/deflect against very real criticism from South East Asians who took umbrage with our portrayal in the movie. Which I think spoke to the underlying reason for the movies existence, and who it's really for- there's a reason the movie opens with a quote about China and it's awakening shaking the world, after all.

There are people who are aware about the film's (completely unintentional, I think) subtext, but they aren't the people who made and promoted the film, and they certainly aren't the people who liked the film and the books.

In the scene immediately after the Jeep scene, they show the male lead character and his friends visiting a hawker centre, to establish how they are just normal people with down-to-earth tastes despite their upper-class backgrounds.

But even then they can't completely hide their classism, because they just had to make sure that you know that these street hawker stalls are the only ones in the world that earn Michelin stars. Well you KNOW it's good since some European assholes tell you it is to virtue-signal about how their value judgments aren't about solely profits and prestige but about real culinary quality.

All the while, the male lead and his friends all speak in this super proper plummy Received Pronounciation. Yeah fucker we know you went to Eton and read PPE at Oxford and got called to the nonce bar, you really don't have to keep reminding us.

Also, most Singaporean hawker food is dogshit designed to scam clueless expats. I once got served a plate of chicken rice with GREEN rice.

they would fight it by assaulting random asians because it's how they are and how their brains work